Westpac lures new CTO from SAP

Westpac has lured the global head of retail banking from German software giant SAP to join the bank as its chief technology officer, and has flagged a restructure of its IT operations.

Westpac chief information officer Dave Curran first came across Robert Wilson when he was running the Commonwealth Bank's core banking refresh program, which was based on SAP technology.

Curran was named Westpac CIO in September and yesterday said that one of his first priorities had been to build a world-class technology team in order to make the bank "number one by 2017."

As part of that he has restructured operations under four general managers. Beside Robert Wilson, who as CTO will be in charge of technology strategy and architecture, Curran yesterday promoted Richard Holmes to the role of general manager of infrastructure and operations. Holmes was formerly CIO for Westpac Retail and BT Financial Group and takes on the position immediately. Wilson joins Westpac at the end of January.

Curran himself retains oversight of application development and business integration until general managers can be found for each of those roles. He said a search was being conducted both internally and externally for the best candidates.

One casualty of the shake-up is Dave Simpson who only joined Westpac to run its infrastructure from Goldman Sachs in April. With Holmes now taking over infrastructure Curran said he and Simpson had "agreed he will move on."

"Infrastructure in so many organisations sits at the corner of technology," said Curran, going on to add that he wants it to play a much more central and transforming role at Westpac.

While Curran and Wilson first met when working on the SAP core banking overhaul at CBA, both were adamant yesterday that the appointment in no way signalled a change in Westpac's technology strategy.

Rather than focusing solely on a core systems refresh at the back end (though it has already committed to upgrading from the Hogan to Celeriti core) Westpac is prioritising the development of systems and platforms of record - the so called Customer Service Hub - to support front line staff and customers.